This is the song that made Elton a superstar. Sure, he’d had hits before – Your Song, Rocketman, Honky Cat – but this took him to another level and gave him his first US chart topper.

It also took Elton from being a quirky singer-songwriter with a flamboyant sense of style to a fully-fledged member of the Glam fraternity, with his stack heels and glitter. 

Not that you’d know it from this moody monochrome vérité-style video of Elt on a shopping spree in West Hollywood.

The single was the first taste of what would become his next album, Don’t Shoot Me I’m Only The Piano Player which I remember buying with eagerness and playing to death in my school days.

To this day I could probably sing its hit singles – Crocodile Rock, Daniel and Saturday Night’s Alright For Fighting – from memory, though the words and tunes of the album tracks (Texan Love Song? Midnight Creeper?) have faded over the years. I doubt I’ve played the album in 40 years.

I guess the song’s primary appeal – apart from its catchy tune and singalong falsetto chorus – is the nostalgic mood Bernie Taupin captures in the lyric, the same sort of mood captured on film in American Graffiti, which came out the following year, and the soon-to-come sitcom Happy Days.

The lyrics are filled with an elegiac wistfulness for the Fifties – hula hoops, rollerskates, cars with fins, girls with huge skirts, boys with quiffs and baseball jackets, and old-fashioned rock’n’roll bands like Bill Haley & The Comets (whose biggest hit is referenced).

Quite why the early Seventies engendered a nostalgia for the innocent days of the Fifties, I’m not so sure. At the time I was too innocent to consider the question.